ScottishPolitics

Why Andy Burnham won’t reform Council Tax either

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich as what they are — a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.” – Ha-Joon Chang

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A stock photo of a luxury car parked outside an equally luxurious mansion.

Something interesting almost happened down south that would have had major ramifications if it had. It didn’t, and thus we probably now go back to politics as usual, but the reason we couldn’t see some positive change is worth exploring.

A group of MPs in Northern England tried to lobby new Prime Minister Andy Burnham on a plan to reform Council Tax in England. They proposed replacing it (and Stamp Duty) either with some rather undefined Land Value Tax or with a more rigorously defined Property Tax based on the present value of a home (unlike Council Tax which is a banded tax that is based on what your home might have been worth in the early 1990s). The Property Tax proposal is a bit more defined, setting the tax at a single national rate of 0.48% of a house’s present market value.

This is very similar to our own Property Tax proposal which set an illustrative national rate of 0.63% as that would have been the rate in 2020 (and in 2025 when we recalculated it) that would raise the same amount of revenue across Scotland as does the present Council Tax. Of course, we are very clear that local councils should control their own local taxes and that includes setting the rates as well as defining subsidies (such as for single-occupancy or low income) and surcharges (e.g. for multiple home ownership).

I don’t know if the Northern MP proposal aims for revenue neutrality. I suspect that it is actually a bit too low for that, particularly as they also want to fold Stamp Duty (the English equivalent of our Land and Buildings Transaction Tax) into it. A couple of things swing towards that lower number though. The first is that houses in England are generally more expensive than in Scotland. The second is that Council Tax in the richest parts of England is particularly low. I mention this in my article in In Common this week but there’s a townhouse in Mayfair, London on the market for just shy of £50 million. It’s a Band H property but will pay just £2,100 per year in Council Tax. This is just over twice what I pay in my Band A house in South Lanarkshire. Council Tax is just about the most unfair tax in Britain and the one most desperately in need of reform.

This also shows why it is so difficult to reform. Not because it’s technically challenging (my In Common article lays out how we’d go about revaluing houses using data we already have) nor because people are against it (the vast majority of people in Scotland want to see it reformed) but because of the specific people who don’t want reform because it would negatively affect them personally.

Our Property Tax proposal, if set at a national revenue neutral rate, would result in a tax cut for every house worth approximately £400,000 or less. This covers 90% of homes in Scotland. There are going to be examples of even more expensive homes that will pay less or break even under our scheme. A Band H house in Edinburgh worth £632,000 would break about even after the tax change (that kind of money would almost get you a three bed flat just north of The Meadows if you’re interested – though you could also get a substantially cheaper house elsewhere and donate the balance to Common Weal).

Houses more expensive than this have been underpaying their property taxes for over 30 years and everyone under this line have been subsidising them.

“The problem isn’t that the top 10% outnumber the bottom 90% in numerical terms. It’s that they outnumber us in power.”

If we implemented the Common Weal Property Tax then my own house would see its tax due drop by about half. And this is before we even think about things like progressive taxation on more expensive properties with surcharges like “mansion taxes”. That £50 million house in Mayfair shouldn’t be paying £1,800 per year. Under the Northern MPs’ scheme, it would owe about £240,000 per year in Property Tax. Under the Common Weal plan, it would owe closer to £300,000 per year. Someone who puts £50 million in the bank could expect close to £2.5 million per year in interest. If they’re buying property as an investment rather than a “nice place to live” then they must be expecting to earn more than this otherwise a passive bank account would be much less hassle. In short, I’m saying that they can afford to pay a fair Property Tax.

But they won’t want to. And this is the reason that neither the SNP in Scotland nor Andy Burnham in England will reform Council Tax unless they are dragged kicking and screaming to the table to do it.

The problem isn’t that the top 10% outnumber the bottom 90% in numerical terms. It’s that they outnumber us in power.

What the very, very top have is lobbying power. They can afford to pay think-tanks (though, for obvious reasons, not us) to tell everyone why it would be a bad idea to tax them fairly. They can bankroll political campaigns. They can buy media outlets to tell us what we should think about their situation and how terrible it would be if they were taxed like the rest of us.

What the people just below them but above 90% of the rest of us have is voting power. They are the ones who consume those media outlets and use it to inform their vote. This Professional Class tends to consider themselves to be about average in our society rather than being amongst the bottom edge of the elite.

So what we get is a democracy where the 1% tells the 9% that they will be hard done by if their wealth taxes increase even a smidge and so the 90% must continue to subsidise them.

This isn’t just a UK problem, it happens in Scotland too. The Scottish Government currently has a “mansion tax” consultation out there that folk should respond to. For a £1m house, the proposed rate is actually almost exactly the equivalent of the 0.48% proposed by the Northern MPs but it only goes down from there. A £2m house would pay only 0.38% and that £50 million Mayfair Townhouse, if it was in Edinburgh, would pay an effective rate of just 0.015% (the extra zero is not a typo). Meanwhile, my wee house – which is amongst the cheapest 10%-15% of houses in Scotland – pays an effective Property Tax rate of 1.3% (again, not a typo). My property tax would be, under the Scottish Government’s “mansion tax” proposal, eighty-six times higher per pound of total value than someone who could afford to buy what would be the most expensive house in Scotland.

So no, I’m nor surprised that Burnham bottled the chance to fix the mess that Council Tax is just as I’m not surprised that the Swinney continues to do so. This isn’t an excuse for them to change tack though. Or to admit failure and tell us who’ll do it for them instead.

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England isn’t going to steal Scotland’s water

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 2 Comments

“A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.” – Terry Pratchett

This is an original post, not published elsewhere. If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

A viral image of an OS-style map showing a water pipeline running from Inverness to London

There’s an image going viral around Scottish nationalist circles right now about hypothetical plans to build an aqueduct to move water from Scotland to England. There are grains of rationality behind it. England is suffering widespread and worsening droughts due to climate change, Scotland still has reasonably abundant water and low demand, at least one UK Prime Minister has actively floated the idea in the past, and there is a long history of Scottish resources being exported from Scotland without the people of Scotland being adequately compensated.

The problem with this idea is that it won’t work – the physics is against it.

For water to flow under gravity, there needs to be a minimum gradient. Current British water pipe standards suggest about 1:100 as a rough rule of thumb – for every 100m the conduit runs horizontally, it needs to drop 1m vertically. The shallowest Roman aqueducts ran at 1:1,000 though they clogged up pretty quickly without constant maintenance. The longest Roman aqueduct – about a 5th of the length of this proposal – had a gradient of about 1:660 along much of its course.

A photo of the ruins of a Roman aqueduct in Cologne, Germany showing a very thick layer of encrusted deposits narrowing the channel.

The straight-line distance between Aberdeen and London is 720km. This means the pipe at Inverness would need to be between 720m-7,200m above sea level to drop the water down to London. If your reservoir is on top of a Munro and you can build like a Roman, you might make it so long as there are no other hills in the way. If you build to British water standards, I doubt you will.

Ah, but we have pumps! Pumps can lift water back up so you can make many small steps down instead on one large one. Yes. That’s the second issue. Pumps cost energy to run. To lift 1,000kg (1 cubic metre – enough for one household for 2-3 days) of water from sea level to between 720m and 7,200m and to transport it at a rate of 1 cubic metre per hour, will cost you between 2kWh and 20kWh. It doesn’t matter how much that costs or whether you get the power from fossil fuels or from solar panels, you still need that power.

To desalinate 1,000kg from sea water in the South East will cost you between 1kWh and 3.5kWh per cm/h.

Therefore, to make an aqueduct from Scotland to England economically viable [See Note] we need a) the capital costs of the longest aqueduct in the UK to be massively lower than that of a bunch of desalination plants and b) to build the pipes more efficiently than current British water standards.

And this is before we consider that a more effective means of supplying demand might be to introduce better, more local resource efficiency measures, to build more reservoirs to store water for the dry seasons or to nationalise the private water companies and prosecute the former directors to recover the costs to repair the leaking pipes.

We also need to consider that a transnational water conduit that the SE absolutely requires is going to be an absurd national security risk given that it could be burst open by a single drone anywhere along its length. Desalination plants are already vulnerable as we can see by the war crimes currently being committed by the US and Iran to that effect, but at least they can be distributed so that taking out one still means that some water can flow.

So no. England isn’t going to build an aqueduct to transport all of Scotland’s water away. It’s going to be much easier for England to build power cables to transport away Scotland’s energy to feed their desalinators instead.

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Note:- There are extremely long water pipelines in the world – the longest feeds from a pressurised fossil aquifer so has a degree of head lift that surface water does not and others tend to drop down from mountains rather higher than Scotland’s.

There are also extremely long, economically viable pumped oil pipelines. Oil costs between a hundred and a thousand times more than water on a per litre basis, so the economics of energy use are very different.

Defining the Right to Grow Old

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“It`s not how old you are, it`s how you are old.” – Jules Renard

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

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I’ve written before about one of the successes of the Scottish Parliament in recent years to do with its attitude both towards human rights and towards international treaties.

On the latter, Scotland’s lack of independence means that our country can only join international treaties as part of the UK and the Scottish Government has no direct say on whether or not we can do so. For example, Scotland cannot formally sign the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child but we can do something else which can signal our support of it.

We can simply pass legislation that acts “as if” we were members of the convention anyway. The CRC isn’t the best example of this in that the UK has been a member of it since the early 1990s but on the other hand, the UK is a “dualist” country which believes that international laws do not apply until and unless the UK passes an appropriate domestic law to bring it into effect (this allows the UK to maintain the stance that its Parliament is superior to international law rather than subordinate to it as is the case with “monist” countries like Germany).

But this approach doesn’t always mean that the UK adopts those conventions as thoroughly as it could, which is why the CRC does give a good example of Scotland deciding to go further in 2024 by incorporating the Convention into domestic law even where the UK’s laws in Scotland didn’t not yet apply.

There was a limit to this. A successful Supreme Court challenge by the UK Government saw the Scottish law modified to make it clear that it didn’t apply to the UK Government’s actions in Scotland (again, allowing the UK to maintain the stance that its Parliament was superior over the Scottish one). This particularly meant that the UK Government could potentially legally treat unaccompanied children claiming asylum in Scotland in ways that would be illegal if the Scottish Government did it. This is a flaw that can only be corrected through independence.

Still, Scotland has successfully pushed forward in protecting the rights of children in Scotland and this is a good thing. There is an opportunity coming up to potentially do it again but this time with respect to the rights of older people. The UN has started the process that may eventually lead to a Convention on the Rights of Older People that would aim to prevent ageism and protect older people in areas where they are currently discriminated against such as the workplace, polices affecting the rights of people in care homes, policies that protect or fail to protect people due to climate change and even policies that discriminate arbitrarily based on age (such as state pension provisions or blocking older people from serving on juries) which may not be appropriate as life expectancies increase or may be better served with individual health and capability assessments.

Many of these areas are subjects that I and Bill Johnston covered in our book All of Our Futures so it is welcome to see parallel developments reach the United Nations in a way that may one day become law.

The Scottish Government should pay attention to this move and monitor it to see where they can legislate domestically to bring Scottish law up to its standards if and where we currently fall short. As with the rights of the child, there are limits to what we can do pre-independence over reserved issues like Pensions though Scottish devolved benefits may be usefully employed if need be and the Government should push harder for the power to introduce a Scottish Universal Basic Income that would allow people to retire earlier if their health requires it while not forcing them to just because they hit a certain age. In some respects we may already go further than this potential treaty might in that we already have the UK Equalities Act which prevents discrimination based on age.

Therein, though, lies the fundamental issue with rights-based legislation.Rights are only as powerful as the rights-holder’s ability to have them upheld. If someone breaches your rights, you need to know that your right has been broken and you need to have the ability to, for example, take the person responsible for upholding your right to court to challenge the failure and seek redress, and those responsible for protecting your rights need to have the resources to be able to do so. This can be difficult or impossible which is why discrimination based on age still takes place in the workplace and why children are still homeless in Scotland despite every Local Authority being legally bound to eliminate child homelessness.

The Scottish Government can’t sign this potential new treaty on the rights of older people but they could get involved with those shaping it to present best practice as applied in Scotland and to show where we ourselves could go further too. If we still can’t sign it by the time it comes into force, then we can do as we did for children and bring our laws up to its standards where they fall short.

Acting “as if” we are part of the international community when it comes to shaping and protecting human rights will be an important step towards us gaining acceptance by that community when we are finally ready to join it formally. Who knows, we might even be able to bring the UK along with us too.

How to make the sun shine at night

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“O, Sunlight! The most precious gold to be found on Earth.” – Roman Payne

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

The problem with renewable energy, we’ve been told for decades, is that it doesn’t work on the schedules of our choosing. Turbines don’t turn when there’s no wind. The sun doesn’t shine at night. And therefore we need fossil fuels and nuclear power plants. Only they are reliable enough to power our society 24 hours a day.

And so, even though we bake in the hottest year of our lives, again, and look forward to every year of the rest of our lives being even hotter. Even though thousands in Britain and thousands more across Europe will not now ever live to see a hotter year – the magnitude of death going almost unnoticed by the media in a way that it would not had it been an act of terrorism. Even as the same people who caused those deaths lobby our governments to let them cause more and make money doing so. Even as all that happens, we’re still told that renewables could never replace fossil fuels because the sun doesn’t shine at night.

What if it did though?

I’m not talking about the Techbro supervillain idea being trailed by an American company to put mirrors in orbit to reflect sunlight. That won’t work, will only burn billions of dollars that could have been spent more sensibly and even if the mirrors launch they will cause untold damage to the environment, to scientific equipment like telescopes and will further wreck our shared Commons that is our view into space.

A much more down-to-Earth solution is, of course, batteries. Battery technology has come on faster than anyone – including renewable energy optimists – could have predicted. Twelve years ago, while Scotland was having its independence referendum, a grid-scale battery cost around $300 per kWh (a kilowatt.hour is a unit of stored energy – a 1kWh battery could run a 1kW electric heater continuously for one hour).

By 2019 when we published our Common Home Plan, the price had more than halved and was closing in on $100/kWh which was considered a major milestone in technological achievement (not for any real physical reason – humans just like round numbers). Now, batteries cost closer to $60/kWh and we’re starting to approach a real milestone. One that will really change the game in terms of how we use these things.

“Crucially, for Scotland, sodium batteries have the advantage that we could make them here if we wanted to”

That milestone is $20/kWh. At $20, these batteries cross a threshold. Connected to enough solar panels to charge them (solar panels have also dropped in price by an astounding degree and now generate human-usable energy cheaper than any technology ever invented by humans going right back to when we first harnessed fire), a $20 battery is capable to delivering energy cheaper than coal, cheaper than nuclear and cheaper than gas.

With just solar panels and batteries, the economic case for burning fossil fuels at night disappears. The fact that batteries can ramp up their delivery very quickly also means that they can take over the job currently done by “peaker” gas turbines that kick in when there is sudden high demand for short periods of time. These peaker plants are the most expensive form of generation on the grid and so replacing them with cheap batteries will have a substantial impact on our energy bills as well as our environmental emissions.

Chinese company BYD has announced that it aims to be the ones to crack that threshold (with their rivals CATL trying to do similar). They are launching a $40/kWh battery next year with further improvements in the months after. Unlike the lithium batteries which have dominated the sector until now, the new battery will be based on sodium.

Sodium is safer to deploy (sodium fires aren’t great, but they’re not as runaway explosive as lithium fires are), easier to extract (you can get it from the salt in seawater) and is a lot cheaper and overall more plentiful than lithium. The major downside is that a sodium battery of a certain size will never store as much energy as the same size of lithium battery. This is a problem for electric vehicles (though sodium battery cars designed to make short hops within towns are coming online too) but less so for grid-scale batteries where space is less of a factor.

Crucially, for Scotland, sodium batteries have the advantage that we could make them here if we wanted to. Scotland doesn’t have substantial lithium deposits but we have plenty of salt in our seas!

Of course, the substantial delays in the kind of investment that Scotland should have been doing to make that happen mean that China has stolen a march on us as they have in so much else of the energy sector. It’s not too late for Scotland. As I said in a recent column (“Scotland is already losing out on green energy. Here’s what we can do.”, The National, 26th February 2026), even if we’re forced to buy Chinese tech to push forward our green transition as urgently as we need to right now, we should also recognise that that tech has a finite lifespan of a few decades and so we should be investing now so that the tech we replace it with is manufactured domestically.

Environmentalists have predicted this moment for decades – decades that were stretched out longer because the oil barons convinced politicians to line their pockets a little longer – but economics now mean that it’s finally here. The transition is unstoppable. Renewables are the future we need. Scotland should work to be on the right side of that future rather than being left behind with the past.

The Climate Emergency is Uninsurable

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“What happened to fun?”
“Our insurance doesn’t cover it!”
– Charles M. Schulz

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

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In an uncertain and unpredictable world, insurance is mostly a good thing (I’ll write an article sometime about when it’s not – it’ll mostly be about the US healthcare system). Climate change is proving to be a challenge for it, though – one that might actually be the thing that forces global adaptation and policy change when other things like activist campaigning or actual scientific data have not.

Consider your house. You live on a flood plain, which means that your house is in a zone covered by a “100 year flood”, meaning that you could expect a flood severe enough to damage your house once every century. Such a flood would cause £100,000 worth of damage. You could fairly expect the insurance value of your house to be about £1,000 per year. An insurance company that charged less than that would eventually find itself paying out more than it brought in.

There’s a problem with the assumption that your house will only get flooded once per century. The climate is shifting rapidly. I’m writing this piece on the day that the UK once again breaks high temperature records. I also read a piece this week about the danger of romanticising the 1976 UK summer heatwave, while reflecting that the UK hasn’t seen average annual temperatures as low as that of the average temperature in that heatwave year since 2012 – the dangerously extraordinary has become dangerously normalised. (1976 was before my time. The first heatwave I have strong memories of is the 1998 one. It’s unlikely I’ll live to see a world as relatively cold as that year was either.

But this (overly) simple calculation doesn’t tell the whole story. If you made an insurance claim after your house was damaged, you’d rarely expect to get the full £100,000 paid out to you. Insurance policies often have an ‘excess’, an amount you have to pay yourself before damage in excess of that amount is paid by the company. In the US, they call it a ‘deductable’, an amount the company deducts from their payment to you. (This linguistic choice tells us a lot about whether the sector is focused on the company first or on the person making the claim).

Further, there are often reasons that a company would not pay out. For instance, many people whose flights were cancelled or disrupted due to Trump’s attack on Iran found that their insurance didn’t cover losses due to acts of war. We’re also assuming that your policy would actually cover £100,000 worth of damage – many people are ‘underinsured’ for the true cost of their losses, particularly if they haven’t updated their policies recently to account for inflation and increases in building costs.

Looking to the future and accelerating climate damage, if a ‘100-year flood’ starts happening every 50 years, your insurance costs would have to double. If you start getting flooded out every decade, you’d probably be cheaper moving elsewhere – but good luck finding someone who’ll buy your house from you. You can run the same kind of calculation about your risk due to sea level rise, wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, storm damage, and every other impact being made worse by the climate emergency.

And that’s if the insurance companies get their estimates right in the first place. If they cost your insurance based on a 100 year flood in a world of 10 year floods, they will very quickly go bankrupt. This is the problem facing global insurance companies, as per a new report from Moody’s.

Between excesses, exclusions, people not buying insurance, and the trouble with estimating insurance values, they estimate that the changing climate could result in $41.4 trillion per year worth of uninsured climate damage globally by 2040. They’ve even created a global map of where and how those losses may manifest. For instance, the rising frequency and intensity of Californian wildfires mean that it’s increasingly difficult now to cover fire damage – 30 per cent of losses are likely to be uninsured.

“It might well be that the threat of losing money proves to be the thing that pulls over those who weren’t convinced by inconvenient things like actual data.”

By this measure, the UK comes off actually quite lightly. The near ubiquity of home and property insurance (usually a basic requirement if one has a mortgage) means that basic cover is quite broad. But still, there is a rising threat of things like flood and storm damage, which means that Moody’s estimates that 25% of the cost of damage and loss from either would be uninsured by 2040.

Part of the problem is that climate damage has been creeping up on us quite slowly, and insurance companies have tended to be reactive rather than proactive – they increase rates after they see their claims start to rise, rather than modelling ahead of time what they could become.

The costs of climate losses are becoming significant, though. They almost certainly outpace the annual profits of the oil companies that have produced the climate damage – yes, this means that the price of oil (high as it is) would be selling at a loss if the oil companies had to pay to clean up their own mess. Instead, we all have to pay even more because they don’t.

Climate activists have been campaigning to try to prevent the climate emergency for decades. Scientists have known it would happen for well over a century. Oil lobbyists have spent lavishly on our politicians to ensure even greater profits can be reaped without having to pay for the consequences. And wars have and are still being fought to keep the pipes flowing.

It didn’t have to be that way, but where scientists and activists could be ignored, it might well be that the insurance agents are the ones that can’t be. It might well be that the threat of losing money proves to be the thing that pulls over those who weren’t convinced by inconvenient things like actual data.

The problem is that this is a reactive force. Only once people see the damage happening will they respond. But the climate effects are so gradual that even if we collectively stopped emitting CO2 globally today, the climate will continue to get worse for perhaps decades still before things begin to repair.

This isn’t a reason not to do that. Every tonne of pollution makes the problem worse. Every day of delay makes the problem worse. Every politician calling for more oil extraction despite all of the evidence to the contrary makes their own contribution to global ecocide worse. But also, every tonne of pollution avoided by switching to renewables or reducing unnecessary demand makes the problem less worse by the same degree.

The solution is in front of us. We know how to fix the climate emergency. It won’t require magic technology, mass poverty, or a collapse in wellbeing – quite the opposite. The solution is a world that, once we live in it, we’ll wonder why we didn’t demand it sooner.

Who Watches the Watchdogs?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“That just goes to show that you never know, although what it is we never know I suspect we’ll never know.” – Terry Pratchett

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

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Almost buried under other political scandals afflicting the Scottish Government and the SNP right now was the news that the Government was found in contempt of court in a case involving the Scottish Information Commission.

The details of the case aren’t particularly relevant to this article though they are part of one of those other scandals. It involved an FOI request to release the legal advice given to the Scottish Government relating to an ethics inquiry into Nicola Sturgeon after an accusation that she breached rules during the investigation into Alex Salmond. While Sturgeon was cleared of wrongdoing following that investigation, a Freedom of Information request to reveal the advice was upheld as valid and the Government was ordered in November 2025 to release the files by January 15th 2026.

The Government failed to do so and the Information Commissioner began legal proceedings over the matter while extending a further deadline of January 22nd. The Government did release the files more than a month after the extended deadline but this month the court found that the delay was deliberate (rather than merely a symptom of the size and complexity of the files as the Government claimed) and disregarding both the Commissioner and the courts amounted to contempt.

And so the Scottish Government now has a criminal record for contempt of court. Not that it particular matters in any real sense as the punishment levied was merely an admonishment (the lightest sentence in Scots Law and really just a formal and legal version of a stern talking to) and an order to pay the Information Commission’s legal costs (given that the Commission is entirely funded by the Scottish Government this just means the same public money going to lawyers, just via a different accounting line).

This is the first time that any Scottish Government has been found in contempt like this and it’s certainly the most serious breach of information regulations that I can find but it’s hardly the first. Both the current Information Commissioner David Hamilton and his immediate predecessor Daren Fitzhenry have been scathing about the Government’s approach to Freedom of Information.

It’s not even the first time John Swinney has transgressed the lines – in 2018, Fitzhenry published an “intervention report” warning about Ministers, including Swinney, deliberately obstructing the FOI process by treating requests from journalists in a different manner from those submitted by the general public, resulting in more rejections and delays to responses if a journalist was identified as making the request. By 2023 as Fitzhenry was passing over to his successor, the final progress report into the Government’s reforms to this behaviour were noted as inadequate with the report saying:

“The Commissioner anticipated that this report would announce the successful conclusion of this intervention, but, unfortunately, the Scottish Government’s improvement activity has not reached a point where this work can be appropriately concluded.”

I have nothing but admiration for Hamilton and Fitzhenry. It’s a difficult job holding Government to account. It’s harder still within the context of the “Commissioner Landscape” that Scotland is in. Previous Governments have been farming out a lot of roles to Commissioners over the years and the varying statuses of each of them has made things extremely messy.

Some positions, like the Information Commissioner, have extremely well defined roles and significant powers – as evidenced by the contempt verdict – but others appear to be little more than purely advisory and have little recourse when the Government decides to ignore the advice.

=Others still chafe under the pressure of making sure that the advice they give to Government is the advice that they already want to hear (in 2023, the then Children’s Commissioner Bruce Adamson only gave a furious rebuke towards the failings of Nicola Sturgeon’s Government to properly embed human rights legislation a week before he left the office, though it’s noteworthy that his successor Nicola Killean is publicly warning this week of the Swinney Government’s failure to ensure that homeless children are placed in safe temporary accommodation).

There was also an identified risk of Commissioners being set up in response to political events such as the downgrading or removal of Ministerial responsibilities – hence the calls for roles such as a Commissioner for Older People, which we supported on the merits of the case for the role even though it added to the broader landscape problem.

In 2024, Common Weal responded to a Scottish Government consultation on reforming this landscape essentially by calling for a standardisation of the role of Commissioners and to make it far more clear who they report to within the Scottish governance structure. Commissioners shouldn’t be seen as merely advisors to Ministers or as a second-best alternative to them but should be seen as the right arm of Parliament (not Government) in holding Government to account.

This principle is, of course, complicated by the realities of politics. For a start, while it is indeed Parliament (not Government) who approves of appointments to the top jobs in a Commission (technically they are appointed by the King, on the nomination by Parliament but with the understanding that the King could appoint anyone they like but promise not to, because monarchies remain a ridiculous way to run a country), it is Government who decides the budget for the Commission. And herein lies the risk in a time where Governments keep being told what to do by people they control the purse strings of.

A few years ago, Audit Scotland started producing more and more critical reports of Government spending only to find that their budget was slashed in 2022. It’s not hard to see how a Government that is constantly being reminded that its projects are late and over budget might prefer for those reports to go away and if the problem can’t be solved, they could simply defund the messenger.

There’s no evidence of this happening at the Information Commission at the moment – their latest accounts show an increase in their operations over the previous year – though it’s worth noting that the Commissioner has already warned that the time spent forcing the Government to comply with the law is eating too much of their resources. I worry that between this new contempt judgement and a stated objective of the current Government to cut the public sector it might be that this office is one that is ordered to accept its (not so) “fair share” of those cuts.

This would obviously be deleterious for both Parliament, the public and our very democracy. Voters cannot hold Government to account if we can’t see what they are doing and so Freedom of Information is, in a very real sense, the foundation stone of our democracy.

All parties in Parliament have a vested interest in ensuring that all Governments are maximally transparent (they can’t hold the Government to account if they can’t see what’s happening either) but I’m going to single out just one. Fresh from their victory (tinged by party tribalism as it was) in securing an independent inquiry of political party finances, I’m going to lay the job of protecting the Information Commission at the door of the Scottish Greens in particular. It’s well within their remit of party policy but more than that, as a party with a history of supporting Government budgets I would say that failing to protect the functions of vital watchdogs from potential cuts would mean complicity in those cuts.

Even this is only a temporary patch on the problem though. Scotland would only be one hostile majority government away from being able push through cuts even despite a united opposition. This is why Common Weal advocates for a Citizens’ Assembly to oversee our elected chamber and we suggest that Commissions and Commissioners should be tasked with submitting their desired budgets to the Assembly to be approved before they are passed to Government to include in the national budget. This would apply a level of safeguarding and scrutiny to the whole process to make sure both that demands are not excessive and that any changes in funding from the Government are driven by need and not by political advantage.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about the need for transparent government. It won’t be the last. The moment we stop being able to see what Government is doing is the moment they stop caring about being seen when doing things. This goes for when the regulations aren’t good enough. This goes for when the regulations aren’t followed and no-one holds them to account. We’re lucky that this time both worked. We need to be lucky every time though. A Government that decides it wants to pull down the curtain of secrecy only needs to be lucky once.

How to solve renewable constraint payments

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 13 Comments

“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” – Joseph Campbell

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

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I would like you to try an experiment with me. Talk about renewables with someone you know who isn’t in the political bubble. It doesn’t really matter if they are for or against renewable energy, but I want you to keep track of how long it takes before they mention a particularly pointed claim against especially wind turbines.

“When it’s too windy, they pay the owners to turn them off!”

What they’re talking about is called “constraint payments”. And the people saying this have a good point. These payments are a major issue at this stage in the now inevitable transition away from fossil fuels and it’s a consequence of how renewable generators produce energy in a ‘non-dispatchable’ manner.

With many fossil fuel generators, the generators can be turned on or off to suit demand (it’s actually not as simple as that – many generators can’t really be ramped up and down or doing so is neither cheap nor efficient and things like nuclear plants are even more limited in how they can respond to demand) but wind turbines only produce energy when the wind blows. This is a problem if there’s no wind but there’s high demand, but it’s also a problem if there’s high wind but low demand – an overnight storm when everyone is sleeping could well overload the grid.

The problem is further compounded by the fact that the UK has an extremely privatised energy generation sector. If everything was owned by the State under, for example, GB Energy (not my preferred solution, but we’ll get back to that), then turbines could be strategically turned off so that supply matched demand. Under a state monopoly, the revenue from the generation would go down, but as revenue isn’t as important as service (I would hope that a single state energy company would run as a not-for-profit anyway) then it all balances out in the end anyway.

The problem comes when various different private companies own some but not all of the turbines. If the energy regulator issues an instruction to a private company to stop generating, then they lose revenue but their competitor who has been chosen today to keep their turbines turning might not.

The solution, to stop the private companies complaining, is constraint payments. Simply paying the generators to shut up and turn their turbines off for the greater good. It’s hardly an optimal solution and it rightly earns the ire of people who live near the turbines but are still paying through their teeth for energy because of all of the other problems we have in the system.

A possible solution came to me this week while reviewing some of the work coming out of our Energy Working Group. The UK is pumping out an overwhelming number of public consultations on energy transformation just now. Common Weal doesn’t usually respond to UK consultations but energy is such an important issue that we feel that we must. However, some of them are ‘public’ in name only as they are long, technical and extremely pedantic in a way that means that only those with specific expertise in the energy sector have a hope of responding to them meaningfully. They certainly don’t adhere to the UK’s own principles of good public consultation.

But our unsung heroes in the Energy Group are doing an amazing job – especially Gordon Morgan who has been taking the lead on many of the responses. I hope to share the latest of them with you all soon.

It was in one of his most recent responses that he mentions something that caught my eye. Common Weal is still arguing for the UK energy sector to be rearranged along the lines of Zonal Pricing. Rather than the current system that prices electricity essentially based on the distance between the generator and London and then from London to you house (there were good reasons for this in the age of coal, not so much now), Great Britain would be split into multiple zones and if your zone happened to be a net exporter of energy, then you could get a discount on your bills – as Scotland is a massive resource for renewables, this would almost certainly mean Scotland would get deeper discounts than, say, London.

There are complications with this plan that Sweden – which has implemented a form of zonal pricing – has to contend with. What happens if the energy exporting zone hits the limits of what it can export? If an Island is generating more energy than it can physically export to the mainland, or if the interconnectors between Scotland and England are maxxed out? If the bottleneck in the system isn’t the generators or the users, but the infrastructure in between?

In Sweden’s case, they have their own form of constraint payment – a congestion revenue – that kicks in and starts arising when generators need to move energy out of their zone. The system isn’t quite the same as the constraint payments issue but here is the key difference between here and there.

In Britain, the constraint payments can be stuffed into the pockets of the owner of the generator. In Sweden, the congestion revenue payments must either be returned to consumers as a discount or must be invested into means of reducing the need for future constraint payments. The payments pay to try to remove the need for themselves.

“If Sweden can do it, why can’t the UK?”

What this means in practice is that there are more investments into interconnectors between the Zones. It could also mean more investment into things like energy storage so that instead of shutting down capacity when limits are reached, then the batteries can be charged instead and then used when demand within the Zone exceeds supply.

Like Sweden does, I could even see a case for discounts or negative pricing for consumers to try to encourage more energy use within the Zone during these times (though in line with Circular Economy principles, we don’t want to encourage too much outright wasteful usage).

So my proposal is this: If Sweden can do it, why can’t the UK (or Scotland, if we ever become independent or energy gets more substantially devolved)?

We don’t have the inter-Zone issue because we don’t (yet) have Zonal Pricing, but the same principle could apply to constraint payments more generally. Companies could continue to collect payments in exchange for turning their turbines off during high winds, but they must not book the money as a profit for themselves. Instead, the payments must be invested into reducing the need for future constraints. They could invest the money into interconnectors (or into driving up more demand within high resource Zones to minimise the need for more interconnector cables), or into energy storage, or pass it down as a discount to customers. But they can’t just keep the cash.

As I say, none of this is my preferred solution. The private sector led, market model of energy doesn’t work (a view recently presented by a coalition of African trade unions, showing that commentators in the UK really need to start looking beyond our borders for better ideas) and we really should be bringing our energy sector back into public ownership. But until that happens, we could be regulating and running the private sector a lot more tightly than we currently do. This one idea – using constraint payments to drive the transition rather than pad the pockets of shareholders – could be a useful step in that direction.

Scotland’s houses are crumbling around us

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“We had a kettle; we let it leak:
Our not repairing made it worse.
We haven’t had any tea for a week…
The bottom is out of the Universe.”
– Rudyard Kipling

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

A photo of a dilapidated house in the Scottish Highlands Image Credit: Trevor Littlewood, CC BY-SA.

This week I had planned to write an article about the recent publication by the Climate Change Committee focusing on its recommendations around adapting buildings for climate change. The way we used to design houses for a colder, dryer climate with fewer hot and cold extremes is simply no longer sufficient but there is also a challenge with applying a one-size-fits-all approach to policy across the UK.

As we’ve seen just this week, the south of England is sooner going to be regularly seeing 40C summers while Scotland is likely to still only see absolute maximums in the low 30s. While the latter is still too hot (I basically cease to function above about 25C), the engineering challenges of keeping houses cool in an occasional 30C heatwave is very different from keeping them cool in a regular summer high of 40C.

Scotland’s houses need to be adapted, and they need to be retrofitted to limit the damage they continue to do to the environment (Common Weal is still engaging with the Scottish Government to shape policies such as the PassivHaus-equivalent energy efficiency regulations and the National Housing Agency).

But on Tuesday, the Scottish Government published some data that changed my focus entirely. It’s not that we don’t need to have that conversation about appropriate adaptations or that adaptations are no longer needed, but that a lot of these adaptations may need to happen at the same time as or after critical repairs are done to the houses just to bring them up to current standards.

The headline figure is stark. More than half of Scotland’s houses, 55 per cent of them, fail the Scottish Government’s basic housing quality standards. Twenty-eight per cent of them fail the legal “Tolerable Minimum” standard and could therefore be deemed not fit for human habitation.

The Scottish Housing Quality Standard was designed in 2004 with a view to applying it to social rented houses. The idea being that this should be the minimum standard of repair and of the provision of amenities delivered to social housing tenants. This standard could be set at a level higher than the minimum legal limit as a means of trying to drive up standards as a whole across the housing sector but also in recognition that because Scotland and the UK sold off and deprioritised social housing as a means of providing houses, those who remain in social houses now are often more vulnerable to poor housing provision than owner-occupiers.

This dataset does not apply the SHQS only to social housing though, but to all houses in the survey. It shows though that if the goal really was to drive up standards across the sector, then it has failed. As said, the average failure rate across all houses in Scotland is 55 per cent. Amongst social houses alone, it’s only(!) 41 per cent, but for houses that are owner-occupied, 60 per cent of them fail this quality standard. For private rented houses, it’s even worse at 62 per cent.

The minimum Tolerable Standard (TS) is even more stringent. Where the SHQS demands provision of services including a decent standard of kitchen and bathroom, the minimum Tolerable Standard can be met with services like a basically functioning indoor toilet and a working sink in the kitchen delivering potable water.

Nevertheless, 28 per cent of Scotland’s houses fail to meet this standard. Just 10 per cent of social houses fail the MTS (reflecting the regulated legal duty of local authorities to provide decent housing), while 24 per cent – almost one-in-four – private rented houses fail the TS (reflecting perhaps that the legal duty placed on private landlords is not being enforced nearly as strongly as it is on social houses). Meanwhile, 36 per cent of owner-occupied houses appear to fall below the legal minimum standard for habitation. Local Authorities technically have the power to mandate owners to undertake repairs, to repair them on behalf of owners or to condemn the house entirely but, in practice, these powers are rarely invoked.

There is a caveat in the private rented figures though. For many local authorities in Scotland, the data on the SHQS and TS failure rates for private rented houses are not available due to lack of responses to the survey. This perhaps makes sense. If you were a private landlord and you owned a house that was in bad need of repairs that you, the owner, weren’t carrying out, would you tell the Government that you were still renting it out despite that?

The local authority with the best(!) housing on the list is West Lothian where only 42 per cent of houses fail to meet the SHQS. The worst is neighbouring East Lothian where 66 per cent – two houses in every three – fail the standard. This is almost a paradoxical result given that East Lothian scores substantially higher than the West on deprivation metrics but again this perhaps makes sense in light of local authorities being better regulated than private landlords or owner-occupiers.

“It’s not enough to fit loft insulation and bolt solar panels onto a house with a leaking roof and call it a day”

There are still huge data gaps in this study. The total survey only covers around 2,500 houses across Scotland meaning that if the survey contacted a completely different set of houses each year, it would take over a thousand years to survey every house. This isn’t normally a problem for statistical surveys when considering the nation as a whole but it does run into problems when breaking the data down by Local Authority (only 299 houses were surveyed in Glasgow, only 11 in Orkney) and it becomes statistically useless when breaking things down even further within those local authorities (the two social rented houses and the single private rented house survey in Na h-Eileanan Siar are possibly not representative samples of rented housing on those islands).

Scotland needs far better data on subjects like this if we are going to form decent public policy – especially when so much of that policy is likely to be delivered by local authorities. They need to know what houses are like in their patch and so a limited national-scale survey simply isn’t good enough. Perhaps the Scottish Government will finally get around to adopting its own policy of launching a Scottish Statistics Agency to help fill data gaps like this.

But this is a bigger problem than data gaps. There are obviously serious failings in Scottish private rented regulations if so many landlords are renting out badly repaired homes that we can see it in the stats even just from the landlords brave enough to admit it. And there are even deeper problems – perhaps linked to inequality and deprivation, perhaps linked to the poor build quality of British houses built by profiteering developers – that mean that owner-occupiers are struggling to maintain their houses, never mind upgrade them to meet climate and energy efficiency standards.

A lot of this isn’t the fault of owners. They mostly weren’t the ones who built the houses either long before the climate emergency became as urgent as it now is or who built them to such shoddy standards that they are now barely surviving beyond the lifetime of their first mortgage. Therefore, owners cannot simply be dumped with the upfront costs of repairing and then upgrading their homes. If they could, they would have done so already. It’s not always about the money. Working out what you need is a specialist skill. Finding the traders who can do the work is another one. Inspecting and auditing their work so they don’t just leave you with even more problems is another one again.

Common Weal has advocated that the fastest, cheapest and most effective way to get Scotland’s houses climate-ready is not to just to ramp up standards and hope that owners will spend their own money to keep up, but to enact that national-scale public works programme to get everyone’s houses up to where they need to be. The issue that these statistics bring into focus is that it’s simply not enough to fit loft insulation and bolt solar panels onto a house with a leaking roof and call it a day.

Every house in Scotland needs to be surveyed prior to this public works upgrade and where repairs are needed, these need to be included in the package. And yes, this needs to be a public works project even for owners who can ‘afford’ to pay for the repairs and upgrades – we can take the money back in taxes later.

But this kind of strategic thinking on housing does not appear to be something that the Government is doing. The two housing policies announced since the election have been the folding of the role of a dedicated Cabinet Secretary for Housing into a broader remit within Social Justice (which could be played to advantage if housing policy is itself dedicated towards the goals of social justice rather than merely inflating house prices for the purposes of boosting corporate profits and capital accumulation) and to announce an equity loan fund which will almost certainly inflate house prices to boost corporate profits and capital accumulation. As we briefed last year, there is very little evidence that First Homes Fund will help the kind of people who couldn’t afford to buy a home without the loan.

This is not the first time that Swinney has announced a policy without evidence. Last year, we revealed that he had absolutely no evidence to back up his claim that increasing the Scottish Child Payment would incentivise mothers to stop working. That attitude cannot be allowed to carry through to housing policy too.

Housing is foundational to the entire economy and our entire society. With Scotland’s climate rapidly changing, the very buildings we live in need to change with it. But before we can even do that, or at least as we embark on that job, we need to fix the houses we have. Everyone deserves a decent roof over their head. According to these statistics on the state of repair of Scottish homes, far too many people in Scotland don’t have one.

Workers aren’t lazy; they’re being left behind

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment — assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. – Bertrand Russell

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

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You will probably know the story right now. That the way to get the UK’s economy growing is to get more people working. And the reason that they’re not working is because a bunch of young people are lazy, feckless and that people are faking mental illness to avoid work and sponge off the benefits system. Claims that the benefit bill now exceeds income tax revenue are flowing around right-wing media outlets to try to delegitimise the entire social security system.

The problem with the story is that much of it is flat out false and most of the rest is misleading to the point of meaninglessness.

To take that last claim head-on, Full Fact did a thorough debunking of it. The total UK social security ‘bill’ has been higher than income tax revenue for quite some time now, but even that point is utterly irrelevant. Income tax is not the only tax paid as a result of wages, National Insurance is too. So even if the benefit bill was only paid for out of direct taxation on worker wages, the claim would be false. But even that idea is itself wrong.

Direct income taxes aren’t hypothecated to pay for social security (not even National Insurance which only sits in a separate pot for historical reasons – all UK public spending comes out of the general Consolidated Fund). Saying that benefits are unsustainable because they cost the country more than it receives in income tax is precisely as illogical as saying that the UK’s military budget is unsustainable because it costs more than revenue from landfill taxes. National budgeting simply does not work like that (I’ll go into the MMT model of how national public budgeting for a currency-sovereign nation actually works another time).

The argument itself begs an important question. If the claim was true – what would its right-wing promoters want to do about it? ‘Cut benefits’, sure, but which ones? The state pension? Anything they personally claim? What kind of world do they think they would create if they ‘won’?

A similar story emerges when looking at young workers. A lot of newspaper lines have been written about unemployed people and feckless ‘NEETs’ who are neither working nor seeking work. To fix the economy, we’re told, those people need to be starved into working via benefits cuts.

Never mind that it won’t work (plenty of data shows that a Universal Basic Income – giving poor unemployed people more money, not less, is the key to improving life chances by allowing people to work under less duress or to improve their prospects through education and training rather than taking the only job that lets them eat tonight).

A large number of people who are ‘NEET’ are people who no reasonable person thinks should be told to drop what they’re doing and go work. The vast majority (in order of size of group) have a long term illness, are students, care for someone, or are retired while younger than state pension age.

What we’re actually seeing among vulnerable workers is a ladder being pulled away from them. There are currently approximately 700,000 job vacancies across the UK. There are approximately 1.8 million people currently unemployed (plus another million who are NEET). This means that there are about 2.5 people actively looking for work for every posted vacancy. This number rises to four people per job if you force the NEETs out to work regardless of their circumstances.

Those two numbers don’t equally divide into each other either. Employment isn’t fungible. A newly redundant senior civil servant isn’t going to take an entry level cafe job if they can help it. A newly graduated student isn’t going to walk into the vacancy left behind by the civil servant. Neither are going to think a job in Kent is going to be worth much to them if they both live in Inverness and can’t or don’t want to move. At some point this kind of ‘structural unemployment’ starts to matter more than the ‘frictional unemployment’ that happens when, for example, the laser engineer I used to be moves from one laser company to another.

“Folk my age and younger were sold the dream that if we played the game and worked hard, we’d be rewarded by being able to get ahead in life.”

This means that it’s simply not a matter of cutting benefits till people squeak and go get a job if the job doesn’t exist for them to get.

And it’s about to get worse, especially for young workers. The latest figures show that not only are posted job vacancies not there, the number of jobs in the economy may be shrinking – around 100,000 jobs were lost in April this year, mostly in sectors like retail and food services. This paints a picture of households starting to cut back on eating out or even on how much they are buying as an economic system rocked by global instability starts to bite.

It’s not just the poor who need more money, it’s everyone else too – at least insofar as the current economic structure is concerned. If politicians want a growing economy based on consumerism, then they are going to need more consumers (immigration rates are falling again and the number of births and deaths in the UK is already nearly net-zero…) and those consumers are going to need more money to spend on consumption. This model of economics simply is not working and is about to come right off the rails even before the impacts of the Iran war and the rise of AI really start feeding through.

Common Weal will soon be publishing a new report looking in detail at the state of income and inequality in Scotland and the results are shocking but one of the most shocking results is the extent to which households fall below not the official poverty line but the line of a ‘minimum decent standard of living’. Even relatively well off households are struggling to raise kids to a decent standard. Beyond this paper we’re going to have to look at how we can pull even those households up not just through better jobs and more income but by changing the way the economy works.

If you can’t afford to buy books, it shouldn’t matter because we have more libraries. Your house should be a decent home at a decent price, not a leaking mould trap that your landlord is profiting from. And the basic infrastructure of your life, like energy, should be there to support you, not pad the profits of the shareholders of the equity funds that own your energy supplier.

Folk my age and younger were sold the dream that if we played the game and worked hard, we’d be rewarded by being able to get ahead in life. What we actually bought was hard work without the reward while still being blamed for not working hard enough by those who got the reward without even having to do the work.

This says that the entire game is rigged against us. Perhaps it’s time to play a different game.

How Common is your manifesto?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Every election is determined by the people who show up.” – Larry J. Sabato

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

The elections are now just hours away and pretty soon we’ll all be scrambling into action to hold the parties in Parliament (particularly those who end up in Government) to get them to fulfil the promises they’ve made to you.

In this, my last post before the vote, I want to have a very brief look through some of the main manifestos to pull out the most and least ‘Common Weal’ policy in each them. Parties – even those constantly at loggerheads over the slightest ideological deviation and even those who appear to have almost no ideological overlap at all often agree with each other on a surprising number of policies (even if they get to them from wildly different positions and motivations – for example, a party might want a Universal Basic Income because it would allow them to eradicate poverty while another might want it because it would allow them to privatise public services and hand out vouchers for you to spend to buy those services instead).

None of this should be in any way construed as an endorsement of any of the parties mentioned though. Common Weal is party neutral and we lobby all parties to adopt our ideals (obviously this is an easier task with some than with others though).

I also can’t cover every party standing in this election. I’m sticking to the largest ones which, according to current polling, have a reasonable chance of winning seats after the election. I have a library of many of the manifestos for this election which includes some of the smaller parties, though even this is non-exhaustive. Apologies if the party you personally support isn’t covered here due to those caveats (though if your party’s manifesto isn’t yet in my library, please let me know and I’ll get it added!).

As a final caveat, do please go and read Nick Kempe’s article looking at mentions of care and care reform in the manifestos as this is also an area that Common Weal are heavily involved in. To avoid doubling our work, I’m steering a little away from care here and looking at Common Weal policies in other areas instead.

SNP

The SNP are almost certainly going to be the largest party in Parliament after next week and will have a good chance of being returned as the principle party of Government. The question in this election really seems to be more whether they’ll have an outright majority, will form another minority government and try to pass budgets etc with ad hoc alliances (likely with the Lib Dems and/or Greens) or whether they’ll form a more formal coalition or cooperation agreement with one or more other parties.

The difference from a lobbying standpoint for us is that minority governments may need to negotiate with other partners to get votes passed and therefore are more open to compromise or outside ideas whereas majority governments can just whip things through on party loyalty.

Most Common Policy

It’s only a single half-sentence in the manifesto but the announcement of a National Housing Agency isn’t just in alignment with Common Weal ideals but is an idea that comes directly from us. We’ve been campaigning for a decade now for such an agency to coordinate housebuilding in Scotland, strategically plan it, ensure adequate building standards and to help to train builders in the latest techniques (something that will be essential if we want to build houses to PassivHaus equivalent standards). None of that is in the half-sentence of course but we have been in contact with the Government and one of our projects for this year is to design the Agency that we think Scotland deserves.

Least Common Policy

The least Common Weal idea in the SNP manifesto as far as I can see is the continuation, and in fact doubling down, of adherence to conventional economic orthodoxy around the only measure of economic “success” being GDP growth and the only means by which Scotland could and should achieve that growth is by “foreign direct investment”. Gone from this manifesto compared to 2021 is any mention of Circular Economy, 15 minute neighbourhoods, Repair hubs (other than a fund for repairing bicycles) or other policies that promote sustainability through deconsumerism.

Reform UK

It goes without saying that Reform are almost entirely ideologically unaligned with Common Weal. Our very mantra “All of Us First” runs directly against their core belief that only some people matter and some matter more than others.

Most Common Policy

Reform are fighting this election based on flipping over the table of governance and pulling power away from the nationalists in Edinburgh and one of the results of that is that they are surprisingly supportive of plans for local government that wouldn’t look too far out of place coming from us with a demand to devolve more power to local authorities. They don’t end up in quite the same place though, as they also support merging Scotland’s already too-large Local Authorities and concentrating power into the hands of “city mayors”.

Least Common Policy

Pretty much everything they have to say about immigration, immigrants and people reliant on social security.

Labour

Labour are the pro-union party that Common Weal has the closest relationship with. We find a lot of common ground on many issues even where we quite happily and openly disagree on others. In the previous Parliament, for example, we collaborated constructively on substantial aspects of care reform (again, see Nick’s article) as well as Members’ Bills on Freedom of Information, Land Reform, what became the PassivHaus Bill and others.

Most Common Policy

Labour are the only party in this list to explicitly mention the National Care Service as an endeavour that they want to bring back in the next Parliament and have explicitly adopted our phrasing that the NCS must be an institution “worthy of the name”. There aren’t a lot of details about what they want to do or what they’ll be able to do if they aren’t in Government, but this is an area that is high on our priority list for the next Parliament and so one that we will be pushing on for more information.

Least Common Policy

Labour’s energy policy doesn’t mention public ownership of energy (at community, Local Authority or Scotland level) beyond a bare mention of the existence of UK controlled GB Energy – which still doesn’t appear to have a clearly defined purpose or stated ambition of how much of Scotland’s energy it would bring into public ownership.

Scottish Greens

The Greens are another party that we’ve worked closely with over the course of the previous Parliament (My own political inclination leans environmentalist, and I was a member of the party for several years though I think my skills and services are much better applied in a cross-party sense these days) and they are in an interesting position in the upcoming election. A potential substantial increase in votes and seats beckons, though the shadow of the uncomfortable coalition with the SNP and its acrimonious collapse looms overhead too which may well limit their influence more than their number of seats suggests.

Most Common Policy

The Scottish Greens have campaigned for a replacement to Council Tax for almost as long as they’ve existed as a party so this isn’t exactly a policy they’ve taken from us in general, but the details of how to implement a proportional Property Tax are now pretty well defined as a result of our work and their policy here closely aligns with our own vision including in terms of its allocation of discounts and surcharges (particularly on ensuring that landlords can’t keep profiting from rent hikes).

Least Common Policy

While the Greens have included a carbon emission tax on land in their manifesto, they have dropped mention of an outright property tax on land. This is an error. Taxing the pollution created by the use of land is important but so is taxing the concept of ownership of excessive land ownership in principle – even managed appropriately, the accumulation of wealth via land ownership must have its limits. This said, the Greens have formally adopted the former Labour position (now missing from the latter’s manifesto) to place a cap on the maximum amount of Scotland that any person can own.

Conservatives

Like Reform, there is little cross-over between Conservative policy and Common Weal’s, though it has happened. We’ve worked constructively particularly at a local level on local democracy reform and it was Conservative voices that proved critical to campaigns we’ve supported in areas like rent controls and Covid policies. With that party looking like it’ll be largely devoured by Reform though, their influence in the next Parliament may be limited. On the other hand, that may force a reevaluation of their political positions and possibly lead to hands reaching out to unlikely allies.

Most Common Policy

If anything, there’s even less in the Conservative manifesto for Common Weal fans than in Reform’s. One of the few policies I’ve found where we’d be pointing in the same direction is in our opposition to the Building Safety Levy but we do so on very different grounds. We oppose it because it has effectively dumped the cost of cleaning up the mess of companies installing unsafe cladding onto house buyers where we believe that more should be done to recover the costs from the companies and their former owners if those companies have been wound up to avoid paying compensation, whereas the Conservatives merely want to make houses a fraction cheaper (they also want to scrap the PassivHaus legislation on up front cost grounds despite the fact that passive houses are cheaper to run and would eliminate fuel poverty).

Least Common Policy

Tax cuts. The Conservatives are quite simply mathematically wrong on their assertions that every devolved tax is on the far side of the peak of the Laffer Curve and that everything will get better if we just cut taxes in ways that benefit the already rich more than those too poor to pay tax as it is. If 40 years of trickle-down economics was going to work, we would have seen it by now.

Liberal Democrats

Along with the Greens, the Lib Dems may be the ones to watch in this election as they will also be vying to become Kingmakers if the SNP don’t win a majority. Indeed, wariness of the former from the SNP after the coalition collapsed along with a less environment and more business leaning FM Swinney may mean they’d prefer a partner wearing orange rather than green. For their own part, the Lib Dems have ruled out any formal coalition but would consider voting for SNP budgets – as they have done the last two times – if the price is right.

Most Common Policy

Although the Lib Dems are still ideologically against independence, they have quite a lot to say about other aspects of constitutional reform that Common Weal has advocated for. They are one of the few parties in Scotland still advocating for a fully Federal United Kingdom (though we caution that this must be framed as true democratic reform, not merely an alternative to independence or a barrier against it) and they have adopted our policies that Citizens Assemblies should be embedded at all levels of government from local to national and that Freedom of Information should apply to private companies that provide government services.

Least Common Policy

Energy policy again. While the Lib Dems are anti-fracking, they are solidly pro-nuclear (despite it being the most expensive form of low-carbon energy generation) and they are pro-carbon capture (despite the inconvenient fact that it doesn’t work). This said, while the Lib Dems aren’t generally the first choice party when it comes to supporting public ownership of things like energy, their manifesto this year does discuss the government taking equity stakes, reforming ScotWind (adopting our own recommendations) and given Local Authorities the power to bring energy into public ownership if they choose.

Conclusion

As I say, none of this is an endorsement of any party nor are we going to state which part is the most Common Weal of them all – all of them have taken on policies that we could support but all of them have also made promises that we’re going to have to fight against. This is fine. It gives us plenty of scope to stay busy in the next Parliament. We’re certainly going to be stuck right in there to try and get as much as we can done and we’ll work with alliances where we can make and join them. If you’d like to support us as we try to pull all of the parties in a more Common Weal direction then please do so here. And I’ll be back on the topic in the next couple of weeks to break down what the results mean once we see what they actually are.